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goldkinThere's a lot to say about the Internet of the eighties and nineties. For starters, it was much simpler. While graphical UIs were still finding their sweet spot with users, plain text reigned supreme. And, in a way, literacy was a mark of pride in this elitist, uncultured sense that many of us associate with the early days of our online presences.
Some time between here and there, many of us seem to have forgotten all that. I'm not sure if it was with the proliferation of the visual web or the invention of Quicktime and Flash, but something is clearly different about the web of today: it's noisy. Very noisy. And this constant battle for attention as we all come together online has caused us, in the words of Rands, to know more people less -- that is, less about more people.
It's fitting, then, that I've retreated from all of this noise back to journalspace. Only a scant time after I left with a hastily-rendered goodbye, here I am again, for exactly the reasons I originally laid out. And I feel empowered for the experience, because I now know another system that almost worked, revealing more of the whole.
I've come to an epiphany about newer discussion systems like Twitter, Facebook, and Google+: they've invested a great amount of time iterating on the concept of internet fora.* It seems, almost, as if they're competing to be the next Usenet, where topics and people gather along common conversational threads that branch off, organically, in this squiggly tree of blather that's oddly captivating. The only difference is users are given control over how they organize the content instead of being pegged to a rigid topic hierarchy.
In this topic, I make no distinction between consumers and producers of online content, except to illustrate certain details of the whole. Indeed, I think this dichotomy is more fuzzy and ethereal than most people give it credit for, and I leave this to further discussion by minds more interested in this subtopic than my own.
The problem is these new systems solve the organizational problem poorly. There's this pervasive assumption that more = better,** with interfaces designed to throw as much content into a single page as possible. The problem with this design is it creates a great deal of visual noise, while failing to address the most important element of these systems: the content itself.
In this desperate fight to stay relevant, newer services have chosen to take whatever it is you're linking and serve it in as close to its original form as possible. For the most part, this works. It provides rich, fleeting, atomically-isolated experiences that can be browsed in arbitrary order, sorted, filtered, packaged, and consumed in modular ways shaped by those responsible for creation and sharing. The price we pay for this is serializing our media in some way, be it through RSS, through some proprietary service like Tumblr, or manually as part of a post or blog entry. In all cases, the goal is to provide as meaningful an experience as possible, as quickly as possible, lest we lose the attention of the users we're trying to talk to.
The problem is this doesn't go far enough. While we have the content, it arrives un- or poorly sorted, as this pastiche narrative lacking coherency and consistency, strung together by date and by source. This incurs a tremendous cost: as more dissonant and more difficult information is added to the system, the mental swapping costs increase rapidly, forcing us to either consume less information or more topical details from our curation. So, while we have more information at our fingertips, we also lack one of the primary strengths of rigid topic centricity: the ability to focus, derived from human filtering and sorting of information.
There's something to be said about this. Humans are, at core, a narrative-driven species. This has been made eminently clear in studies of memory, where the salient point is this: when information is given common context, it becomes collapsible, as a single unified reference to a larger body of information. To this end, organized, narratively-driven, compartmentalized information seems very much to be how the mind works when processing information. Context matters, if only to make ideas more collapsible and to lower the need to defrag through careful writing and analysis.
Somewhere, we seem to have lost this notion. Sure, we can filter tweets by person or by #hashtag. Sure, we can filter users and threads on G+ and Facebook. And yes, we can filter on specific tags here on Dreamwidth and LiveJournal, organizing content from each user into different data boxes perusable at our leisure.
But, that isn't enough. What we need is a system that tells a story, using the information derived from all of the content we wish to consume. It needs to be time-sensitive. It needs to be pithy. And it needs to use space efficiently and elegantly, making as much use of limited visual context as possible.
The bizarre thing is I see this as the savant child of vBulletin and a tag cloud, with an RSS reader, Twitter, and whatever stapled to its input chute. At any point in time, I'd like to be able to see topics with the highest amount of unique signal enlarged, with lesser topics swirling around it. I would like to be able to click through this and get an organized, pruned selection that tells me as much about this topic as possible, branching off into its related subtopics. I'd like the ability, when I'm feeling lazy, to take this thing and stream it using two separate simplifying criteria: order of importance and order of interest. And, then, I would like for it to read to me, and I would like to become a part of the story.***
There's plenty of ways to improve this idea, but I feel it's a start. It gets us away from the monolithic, noisy, unorganized mess that most of our online interactions are shaping into. That noise should remain, of course -- spontaneous, timely, arbitrarily-organized media is what makes the online world so fluid and so fascinating.
But, for discourse, I feel we can do so much better for ourselves, if only by using the content to organize itself. I think I would call such a thing flora, because it appeals to my aesthetic sensibilities in a name for at least five distinct reasons.
---
* I credit a friend going on a decade now, Rethoras (aka, "Badger"), for this observation. It's a poignant one that stuck with me when he first pointed out how similar blogs were to internet forums, elevating the content of the original poster while leaving the discussion and organization less defined.
** Unless you're Twitter, in which 140 characters of text is clearly enough for everybody. </snark>
*** The entire field of machine learning that would enable such a technology is fascinating to me, though I struggle to grasp its finer points and more difficult algorithms. Suffice to say, I believe all of this is possible, given our current understanding of text processing approaches that extract significant words or clauses and collapse them into distinct classification buckets for each topic. It would be a textbook problem for Google to solve, if they hadn't decided to be evil about it.
Some time between here and there, many of us seem to have forgotten all that. I'm not sure if it was with the proliferation of the visual web or the invention of Quicktime and Flash, but something is clearly different about the web of today: it's noisy. Very noisy. And this constant battle for attention as we all come together online has caused us, in the words of Rands, to know more people less -- that is, less about more people.
It's fitting, then, that I've retreated from all of this noise back to journalspace. Only a scant time after I left with a hastily-rendered goodbye, here I am again, for exactly the reasons I originally laid out. And I feel empowered for the experience, because I now know another system that almost worked, revealing more of the whole.
I've come to an epiphany about newer discussion systems like Twitter, Facebook, and Google+: they've invested a great amount of time iterating on the concept of internet fora.* It seems, almost, as if they're competing to be the next Usenet, where topics and people gather along common conversational threads that branch off, organically, in this squiggly tree of blather that's oddly captivating. The only difference is users are given control over how they organize the content instead of being pegged to a rigid topic hierarchy.
In this topic, I make no distinction between consumers and producers of online content, except to illustrate certain details of the whole. Indeed, I think this dichotomy is more fuzzy and ethereal than most people give it credit for, and I leave this to further discussion by minds more interested in this subtopic than my own.
The problem is these new systems solve the organizational problem poorly. There's this pervasive assumption that more = better,** with interfaces designed to throw as much content into a single page as possible. The problem with this design is it creates a great deal of visual noise, while failing to address the most important element of these systems: the content itself.
In this desperate fight to stay relevant, newer services have chosen to take whatever it is you're linking and serve it in as close to its original form as possible. For the most part, this works. It provides rich, fleeting, atomically-isolated experiences that can be browsed in arbitrary order, sorted, filtered, packaged, and consumed in modular ways shaped by those responsible for creation and sharing. The price we pay for this is serializing our media in some way, be it through RSS, through some proprietary service like Tumblr, or manually as part of a post or blog entry. In all cases, the goal is to provide as meaningful an experience as possible, as quickly as possible, lest we lose the attention of the users we're trying to talk to.
The problem is this doesn't go far enough. While we have the content, it arrives un- or poorly sorted, as this pastiche narrative lacking coherency and consistency, strung together by date and by source. This incurs a tremendous cost: as more dissonant and more difficult information is added to the system, the mental swapping costs increase rapidly, forcing us to either consume less information or more topical details from our curation. So, while we have more information at our fingertips, we also lack one of the primary strengths of rigid topic centricity: the ability to focus, derived from human filtering and sorting of information.
There's something to be said about this. Humans are, at core, a narrative-driven species. This has been made eminently clear in studies of memory, where the salient point is this: when information is given common context, it becomes collapsible, as a single unified reference to a larger body of information. To this end, organized, narratively-driven, compartmentalized information seems very much to be how the mind works when processing information. Context matters, if only to make ideas more collapsible and to lower the need to defrag through careful writing and analysis.
Somewhere, we seem to have lost this notion. Sure, we can filter tweets by person or by #hashtag. Sure, we can filter users and threads on G+ and Facebook. And yes, we can filter on specific tags here on Dreamwidth and LiveJournal, organizing content from each user into different data boxes perusable at our leisure.
But, that isn't enough. What we need is a system that tells a story, using the information derived from all of the content we wish to consume. It needs to be time-sensitive. It needs to be pithy. And it needs to use space efficiently and elegantly, making as much use of limited visual context as possible.
The bizarre thing is I see this as the savant child of vBulletin and a tag cloud, with an RSS reader, Twitter, and whatever stapled to its input chute. At any point in time, I'd like to be able to see topics with the highest amount of unique signal enlarged, with lesser topics swirling around it. I would like to be able to click through this and get an organized, pruned selection that tells me as much about this topic as possible, branching off into its related subtopics. I'd like the ability, when I'm feeling lazy, to take this thing and stream it using two separate simplifying criteria: order of importance and order of interest. And, then, I would like for it to read to me, and I would like to become a part of the story.***
There's plenty of ways to improve this idea, but I feel it's a start. It gets us away from the monolithic, noisy, unorganized mess that most of our online interactions are shaping into. That noise should remain, of course -- spontaneous, timely, arbitrarily-organized media is what makes the online world so fluid and so fascinating.
But, for discourse, I feel we can do so much better for ourselves, if only by using the content to organize itself. I think I would call such a thing flora, because it appeals to my aesthetic sensibilities in a name for at least five distinct reasons.
---
* I credit a friend going on a decade now, Rethoras (aka, "Badger"), for this observation. It's a poignant one that stuck with me when he first pointed out how similar blogs were to internet forums, elevating the content of the original poster while leaving the discussion and organization less defined.
** Unless you're Twitter, in which 140 characters of text is clearly enough for everybody. </snark>
*** The entire field of machine learning that would enable such a technology is fascinating to me, though I struggle to grasp its finer points and more difficult algorithms. Suffice to say, I believe all of this is possible, given our current understanding of text processing approaches that extract significant words or clauses and collapse them into distinct classification buckets for each topic. It would be a textbook problem for Google to solve, if they hadn't decided to be evil about it.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-09 05:37 pm (UTC)(I pine somewhat for actual Usenet. It's still there, of course, but more and more providers are dropping news server access from their service palettes - my own did last summer or the summer before, I forget - and the few times I've dipped back in since then, signal to noise was really pathetic except perhaps in a few places. Certainly the various occult/pagan/magick groups have gone down the tubes, in my opinion. I probably wasn't around for the real "golden age" but in my personal history that was somewhere in the mid to late 90s.)
no subject
Date: 2011-09-10 11:11 pm (UTC)The fact it's basically a ghost town for most groups now is a sign that newer services, while not necessarily better, are certainly more popular, and people have shifted their social circles and online presences in order to accommodate.
As far as text-based Usenet is concerned, I use nntp://nntp.aioe.org, since it provides anonymous read and write access with reasonable quotas and excellent spam filtering. It's been down a few times, but it's much better than Google Groups or what flaky ISP servers remain.